Valve officially showed off the 13 official Steam Machines during its brief CES press event this evening, but it was in the aftermath where we got a closer look at the devices. Below, Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson snapped photos of all the Steam Machine variants in their glorious array of shapes and sizes.

Now from a user perspective the advantage I can see is for the people who don't want a beefy PC sitting around in their apartment and they may not care much for regular PC tasks either now when they have their tablet and smartphone.

A "Steam Machine" is a regular pc. People really need to understand the term "Steam Machine" doesn't describe a new product, it's basically just marketing fluff.

The Steam machines offer them a way to get a PC in a less common form-factor and hide it away beside or behind their TV.

Small and/or less common form-factor pc cases have been available for years. Most of my htpcs are hardly bigger than a Nintendo Wii, if at all. The most recent is probably 3 years old.

There is absolutely nothing new to see here. Everything about a "Steam Machine" is old news with the exception of the OS. It's funny when Valve says "A powerful new category of living-room hardware is on the horizon", but then turns around and explains how you can build a Steam Machine yourself completely out of off-the-shelf parts.

I know perfectly well that the term "Steam Machine" does not automatically equal something new.
However, I get the impression that Alienware are _not_ going to just use off the shelf parts, and are actually gonna make a custom case and some custom components, in order to get the size down enough to be smaller than current consoles and also look good.

I'm not sure how it will turn out, as I haven't seen a finished product. So I'm holding judgment for now.

I was hoping, however, that Valve would have built and massproduced one themselves aswell, as they originally stated they would do. But that doesn't seem to be happening.

However, implying that a Steam Machine would never be anything new, is wrong.
They _can_ be built with off the shelf parts, and that's a good thing (keep it standardized), but they don't have to be.

That's what I mean when I say consoles are the same as PC's. Technologically, there is very little separating them. But since they cannot be built using off the shelf parts, which I have never ever said or implied, that makes them worse in my opinion. You're stuck with what is offered on the table and cannot do anything about it until they decide to sell the next generation.

It has it's advantages ofcourse, but technologically it's a standstill for 7-8 years. That's not something I consider a good thing.

IF Valve plays their cards right, and that's a big if (I'm still holding judgment), they can change that. But they need to tighten the requirements a bit, so that there is a clearer path for developers to follow.

Maybe they will, maybe they already have clear paths for developers, I don't know. But I'm not gonna bash them before we see how it all turns out.

They have managed to get several big developers on board and they claim many more big developers are on board aswell, so they must be doing something right.

And this _is_ something new.
This is the _first_ time big developers actually give a damn about other PC platforms than Windows (and Mac to a degree).
They have also gotten Intel, AMD and nVidia to dramatically (atleast in Intels and AMD's case) improve lacking graphics drivers on said platform.

Without this push from Valve, none of that would have happened. So it _is_ something new and to some degree has already been a success, whether the Steam Machines win or fail.